I will not hide that the Argentine national team's undeserved victory over Egypt in the World Cup was my first motivation to look into Argentina's history.

The start may be football-related and biased, but the question it led me to quickly transcended football: how does the Argentine national team appear completely devoid of any Black player, in a continent where Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved played a fundamental role in building most of its countries? Where did the Blacks of Argentina go?

The answer is that they did not all leave, nor did they completely disappear. What disappeared, or was hidden, was their presence in the image that Argentina created for itself and long promoted as a white, European country whose inhabitants descended from ships, coming mainly from Italy and Spain. As for Africans and their descendants, they were gradually pushed to the margins of history, until their absence from the national team became a natural extension of their absence from national memory.

But Argentina was not always as it appears today. Since the late 16th century, enslaved Africans arrived at the port of Buenos Aires and spread to different areas of the Spanish Empire. They worked in homes, farms, workshops, crafts, and transportation, served in armies and militias, and contributed to the economy and daily life, just as in the rest of the continent.

Old censuses indicate that Blacks and those of mixed origins constituted, at various times, nearly a third of Buenos Aires' population, while in some interior cities and provinces, the proportion rose to about half. In the 1838 census of Buenos Aires, the number of Blacks and mixed-race individuals was about 15,000, roughly 26% of the population covered by the racial classification. Less than half a century later, the 1887 census recorded only about 8,000 'non-whites,' not exceeding 1.8% of the city's population. This decline was not merely a statistical trick but a real demographic decline.

Black men participated in numbers exceeding their population share in the wars of independence and civil conflicts. For some enslaved individuals, conscription was a conditional path to freedom, but it was also a short path to death. Records indicate a clear imbalance between men and women within the Afro-Argentine community due to successive military losses.

Yellow fever affected the poor and crowded neighborhoods where many Blacks lived, but more impactful was the long accumulation of poverty, poor housing, high child mortality, low birth rates, and successive wars.

The scarcity of Black men, coupled with an influx of European immigrants mostly male, led to widespread marriages between women of African descent and European men. With each generation, many children became lighter-skinned, and then were socially and statistically reclassified as 'white.' African origins did not disappear from bodies; recognition of them disappeared.

But the biggest factor in transforming the image was the massive European immigration. Between the 1870s and World War I, about six million Europeans arrived in Argentina, more than half of whom settled there. Immigration was not merely an economic need for population and labor, but part of a political and intellectual project to build a nation on the European model. Nineteenth-century elites linked 'progress' to Europe and viewed African and indigenous components as obstacles to the 'civilizing' project. The state encouraged European immigration, while schools, books, and the press crafted an image of Argentina as an extension of Europe in South America.

There is not enough evidence to prove the sensational account of a 'secret genocide plan' and the physical elimination of all Blacks. But the lack of proof of a central plan does not mean the state or society is innocent. There were discriminatory policies, wars in which Blacks bore a disproportionate share of bloodshed, living conditions that increased their mortality, a national project that deliberately favored the European element, and then a long official and cultural process that denied their existence and removed them from the country's narrative about itself.

Argentina was not content with the decline in the number of its Black citizens; it turned this decline into a myth saying they never existed in the first place.

The Argentine state itself today acknowledges that Afro-Argentines have been subjected since the late 19th century to 'continuous official erasure' that harmed their ability to recognize and take pride in their roots, and obscured their social, economic, and cultural contributions.

Even the most famous thing Argentina gave the world bears an indelible African trace. Tango was not a purely European invention; it arose in ports and working-class neighborhoods from the interaction of multiple traditions. Tango may not be 'fully African,' but Africa is one of its fathers whose name was dropped from the birth certificate.

And in football as well, the effect of this absence appears. Argentina has known Black players, but they remained rare exceptions. Alejandro de los Santos, son of an Argentine family of Angolan origin, was the first known Black player to represent the national team, and participated in its victory in the South American Championship in 1925. Years later, goalkeeper Héctor Baley emerged, a member of the team that won the 1978 World Cup. But the presence of a Black player on the national team remained an exceptional event, not a natural reflection of the country's diversity. Argentina did not completely eliminate its Black population, but long succeeded in making them invisible.

Some died in wars, epidemics, and poverty; some emigrated; many integrated through marriage and mixing; then the millions of Europeans came and changed the demographic balance. Thereafter, the state, schools, statistics, and culture took over to complete the task: turning decline into absence, absence into denial, and denial into national identity.

The sad question is how a country managed to convince itself and the world, for over a century, that a people who contributed to its construction never existed?

Perhaps this is one of the benefits of losing to Argentina: that it pushes us, after the anger over the result subsides, to look behind the colors of the jerseys and search for colors that were erased from the image of an entire country.

Translated from Al-Nahar

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